The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate

The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate PDF Author: Toby A. Appel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195364805
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
For scientists, no event better represents the contest between form and function as the chief organizing principle of life as the debate between Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This book presents the first comprehensive study of the celebrated French scientific controversy that focused the attention of naturalists in the first decades of the nineteenth century on the conflicting claims of teleology, morphology, and evolution, which ultimately contributed to the making of Darwin's theory. This history describes not only the scientific dimensions of the controversy and its impact on individuals and institutions, but also examines the meaning of the debate for culture and society in the years before Darwin.

The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate

The Cuvier-Geoffrey Debate PDF Author: Toby A. Appel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195364805
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
For scientists, no event better represents the contest between form and function as the chief organizing principle of life as the debate between Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This book presents the first comprehensive study of the celebrated French scientific controversy that focused the attention of naturalists in the first decades of the nineteenth century on the conflicting claims of teleology, morphology, and evolution, which ultimately contributed to the making of Darwin's theory. This history describes not only the scientific dimensions of the controversy and its impact on individuals and institutions, but also examines the meaning of the debate for culture and society in the years before Darwin.

Georges Cuvier

Georges Cuvier PDF Author: Dorinda Outram
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000534774
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book, first published in 1984, examines the lifetime of Georges Cuvier, and in his constant and varying struggles to retain his position both as a politician and as a leading naturalist we find displayed almost all of the political tensions of Restoration France. Our understanding of the new French intellectual elite is enhanced if we can explain what sort of power this group wielded, and how it related to the structure of politics as a whole. Cuvier’s career epitomises this relationship to the highest degree. Examination of the building of his career under the Directory and Empire offers many new insights into the way the expanding market for science, the restructuring of society as a whole, and the moral authority of science itself could be utilised as resources in the making of a reputation. The influence of scientific competition and controversy on Cuvier’s scientific work is examined at length, and it is argued that they exerted a decisive effect on the structure of his biological and geological thinking.

Controversy in Victorian Geology

Controversy in Victorian Geology PDF Author: James A. Secord
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400854660
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Secord gives a dazzlingly detailed account of this scientific trench warfare and its social consequences. One ends up with a marvellous feeling for the major taxonomic enterprises in Darwin's younger day: mapping, ordering, conquering 'taming the chaos" of the strata. All of these of course had social and imperial ramifications; and Secord mentions geology's moral appeal (in supporting a divinely-stratified Creation) to a beleaguered elite intent on subduing the lower orders. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Making Way for Genius

Making Way for Genius PDF Author: Kathleen Kete
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities —Germaine de Staël , Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier—Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionalist view of ambition prevailed—that is, ambition as morally wrong unless subsumed into a corporate whole—the new regime was marked by a rising tide of competitive individualism. Greater opportunities for personal advancement, however, were shadowed by lingering doubts about the moral value of ambition. Kete identifies three strategies used to overcome the ethical “burden” of ambition : romantic genius (Staël ), secular vocation (Stendhal), and post-mythic destiny (Cuvier). In each case, success would seem to be driven by forces outside one's control. She concludes by examining the still relevant (and still unresolved) conundrum of the relationship of individual desires to community needs, which she identifies as a defining characteristic of the modern world.

The Development of Darwin's Theory

The Development of Darwin's Theory PDF Author: Dov Ospovat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521469401
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In this highly acclaimed book, Ospovat shows that Darwin's views changed radically from his first formulation of evolution to the publication of the full theory in 1859.

Science, Enlightenment and Revolution

Science, Enlightenment and Revolution PDF Author: Dorinda Outram
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000441334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Science, Enlightenment and Revolution brings together thirteen papers by renowned historian Dorinda Outram. Published between 1976 and 2019 and scattered in a variety of journals and collected volumes, these articles are published together here for the first time. During her distinguished career, Outram has made significant contributions to the history of science, to the history and historiography of the Enlightenment, to gender history, to the history of geographical exploration, and to the historical uses of language. This volume also includes other writings by Outram, comprising an unpublished introduction in the form of an intellectual autobiography. Placing this together with her collected academic papers offers readers an overview of her development as an historian and a writer. This book is important reading for scholars and students of early modern Europe, as well as those interested in the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and gender studies. (CS 1101).

Science Under Control

Science Under Control PDF Author: Maurice P. Crosland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521524759
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
This book examines French science in the 19th Century under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences.

Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior

Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior PDF Author: Robert J. Richards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614951X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
With insight and wit, Robert J. Richards focuses on the development of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior from their first distinct appearance in the eighteenth century to their controversial state today. Particularly important in the nineteenth century were Charles Darwin's ideas about instinct, reason, and morality, which Richards considers against the background of Darwin's personality, training, scientific and cultural concerns, and intellectual community. Many critics have argued that the Darwinian revolution stripped nature of moral purpose and ethically neutered the human animal. Richards contends, however, that Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and their disciples attempted to reanimate moral life, believing that the evolutionary process gave heart to unselfish, altruistic behavior. "Richards's book is now the obvious introduction to the history of ideas about mind and behavior in the nineteenth century."—Mark Ridley, Times Literary Supplement "Not since the publication of Michael Ghiselin's The Triumph of the Darwinian Method has there been such an ambitious, challenging, and methodologically self-conscious interpretation of the rise and development and evolutionary theories and Darwin's role therein."—John C. Greene, Science "His book . . . triumphantly achieves the goal of all great scholarship: it not only informs us, but shows us why becoming thus informed is essential to understanding our own issues and projects."—Daniel C. Dennett, Philosophy of Science

The Société Zoologique D'acclimatation and the New French Empire

The Société Zoologique D'acclimatation and the New French Empire PDF Author: Michael A. Osborne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description


Science and Religion

Science and Religion PDF Author: Pietro Corsi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521242452
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Science and Religion assesses the impact of social, political and intellectual change upon Anglican circles, with reference to Oxford University in the decades that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. More particularly, the career of Baden Powell, father of the more famous founder of the Boy Scout movement, offers material for an important case-study in intellectual and political reorientation: his early militancy in right-wing Anglican movements slowly turned to a more tolerant attitude towards radical theological, philosophical and scientific trends. During the 1840s and 1850s, Baden Powell became a fearless proponent of new dialogues in transcendentalism in theology, positivism in philosophy, and pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories in biology. He was for instance the first prominent Anglican to express full support for Darwin's Origin of Species. Analysis of his many publications, and of his interaction with such contemporaries as Richard Whately, John Henry and Francis Newman, Robert Chambers, William Benjamin Carpenter, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, reveals hitherto unnoticed dimensions of mid-nineteenth-century British intellectual and social life.